PERTH BIODESIGN

From March 2018 onwards, the SPARK Co-Lab Design Course has become Perth Biodesign. The Perth Biodesign course brings together people from a broad range of disciplines with a passion for discovery and development in medical devices.

Participants will form multidisciplinary teams, and learn to create and innovate within the medical space to develop their own novel solutions for unmet medical needs. Participants will also learn how to become biomedical entrepreneurs, plan their early stage commercialisation and develop relationships with commercial partners and investors. Although the course is focused primarily on teaching about the life sciences development and commercialisation path, participating teams will have the added bonus of developing a biomedical technology opportunity, patent, company, multidisciplinary team and investor pitch. Some may attract seed funding upon finalising the course, presenting at the pitch night.

The course has been designed with a focus on doctors, scientists, engineers and business people or senior medical, science, engineering or business university students.

SPARK Co-Lab’s founders had the vision and foresight to see how Perth could benefit from the Stanford SPARK and Biodesign methodologies, and worked hard to adapt these programs to best suit local market conditions.

This resulted in the SPARK Co-Lab Design Course which ran with great success in 2016 and again in 2017 with support from Accelerating Australia, bringing together the best and brightest from across medicine, science, engineering and the world of business. Following the success of the first two rounds of the Design Course, and with the ongoing evolution and maturing of the life sciences sector in Perth and around Australia (where other versions of the Stanford SPARK and Biodesign programs have also been trialled), a partnership between Accelerating Australia and SPARK Co-Lab will now enable the Perth Biodesign course to be delivered based on the Stanford Biodesign methodology. Accelerating Australia will also support roll out of the Biodesign course Australia-wide.

The new Perth Biodesign course directors are currently on secondment to Stanford University. Matt Oldakowski is taking part in the Global Faculty In Training program in preparation for taking up his new role and Intan Oldakowska, a graduate of the 2016 SPARK Co-Lab Design Course, is working at Stanford’s newly formed Otoinnovation Lab.

Moving forward, not only Perth but Australia’s whole life sciences ecosystem will be able to benefit from the time and financial investments made by both SPARK Co-Lab and Accelerating Australia to bring the Stanford Biodesign methodology to Australia. Further information can be found through the Biodesign Australia website. Expressions of interest for the 2018 Perth Biodesign course are invited.

Accelerating Australia is a not-for-profit, national consortium of universities, companies and healthcare providers which aims to boost biomedical entrepreneurship and early stage commercialisation across the biomedical sector in Australia.